Spontaneous Monotony

A number of services have sprung up in America (and will therefore by past experience end up here as well) that let members of the public fake Caller ID- in other words choose the number that displays on the phone of the person who receives the call. The main useful purpose of this is for conmen, who could for example pretend to be phoning from British Gas and have their phone number appear as the ‘caller’, making them appear legitimate. Of course, since it is of little risk to big business President Tony hasn’t made it illegal here, lets just hope that whoever gets in on May 5th changes that before we all suffer.

See Also:

• BBC News | Fake call ID services on the rise

Just want to congratulate the Bhoys on their win today, didn’t see the game because it was on Setanta, but great to get the win anyway. The league is nowhere near over yet, but being five points ahead with 4 games left can’t hurt.

Apologies for anyone who read the last post (now deleted). All the plugins mentioned in it have been removed, because they just didn’t work (Simple Spoilers) and/or because they broke XHTML validity. Ironically the latter was a plugin named X-Valid which, you guessed it, is supposed to ensure valid XHTML is contained in posts and comments. Could have gone better I suppose.

As of the 28th of April (or as soon after that as Royal Mail manage to deliver my copy) I will be joining the legions of MMO players with a preordered copy of Guild Wars. I’m not a huge fan of repeating publishers’ promotional stuff, so I’ll just summarise what made me buy it in bullet points:

• Not a cash cow. No monthly fee for the ‘privilege’ of using my property
• Team includes many of the developers of Diablo 2 (especially the Battle.net component of said game, which is very reliable)
• Fast-paced and designed to be enjoyable for casual gamers and obsessives alike. No level treadmill, no playing for ten hours to gain ‘+1 woodchopping’, and access to a wide variety of skills from the start.
• AI-controlled ‘henchmen’ available for when the people you usually play with are offline
• Did I mention no monthly fee?

For some unknown reason, CD-WOW were ‘having problems with their suppliers’ and were unable to dispatch SWAT 4 to me (and didn’t have the faintest idea when they would be able to). Of course Play, Amazon, GAME and all the other places I compared all have it in stock, so there obviously isn’t a shortage. I am aware that this is probably nothing more than an isolated incident, and they did give me my money back promptly when asked (although if they didn’t have the software I ordered why did they take it in the first place?) but unfortunately since this is the first time I’ve used them, that gives them a 100% failure rate, and in future I’ll stick to the sites I know can deliver the goods (metaphorically and physically).